Yahoo! and Cisco want their anti-spam tech made standard

Cisco Systems, Yahoo! and partners are proposing that the whole computing industry adopt their anti-spam technology as standard. The technology, which works by focussing on identifying forged email addresses, is known as the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) specification and has been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) just recently.

With DKIM, which relies on public key cryptography, a digital signature is attached to outgoing email so recipients can verify that the message comes from its claimed source. The idea is to make it easier to eliminate spam or phishing emails with spoofed addresses by marking out legitimate messages. The specification merges two earlier proposals, Yahoo!'s DomainKeys technology and Cisco's Internet Identified Mail system.Many companies have been involved in this effort, including Alt-N Technologies, AOL, EarthLink, IBM, Microsoft and VeriSign, as well as Cisco Systems and Yahoo! themselves. The companies believe that this is a big milestone for the email authentication efforts going on to try and stop the plague that is spam.